Wack-Dietz
House

43 East Vine,
1847

The main section of this frame house, built
in 1847, derives from the Greek Revival, as indicated by the returns
at the eaves of the gable facing the street. The west wing, with its
Italianate bay, is a later addition.

Chauncey Wack, Oberlin's nineteenth-century
anti-hero, lived here. A native of Bennington, Vermont, Wack arrived
in the village at age 24 in 1840. Over the next half-century,
whatever Oberlin cherished, Wack normally opposed. For a long time he
ran a rather disreputable hotel on the east side of South Main Street
near the railroad depot. Among his overnight guests were the slave
catchers who provoked the Wellington Rescue of 1858, a succesful
Oberlin effort to save fugitive John Price from being returned to
slavery by way of Wellington, ten miles to the south. At the trial of
the rescuers for violating the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Wack was a
star witness for the prosecution.

Another boarder at his hotel in those days
was Stephen Dorsey, a mobile young man from Vermont who married
Wack's daughter Helen in 1865. Dorsey went on to achieve wealth and
notoriety as a spectacularly corrupt U.S. senator from Arkansas in
the 1870s. It was during Dorsey's service in Washington that Wack
retired from the hotel business and moved into this house with
daughter Helen. Meanwhile he had emerged as Oberlin's staunchest
Democrat and was in the habit of hovering about the polls on election
day to challenge blacks who tried to vote. Despite an overwhelming
local Republican majority, he served a term or two on the village
council, and when Grover Cleveland became president in 1885,
Oberlin's 126 Democrats unanimously voted to make Wack the local
postmaster. To their dismay, Cleveland chose another man.

A few years after Wack's death in 1900, the
house became the home of the Dietz family, which moved from New York
City when Father Peter Dietz, a prominent "labor priest," took charge
of Oberlin's fledgling Catholic parish. An advanced spokesman of
Catholic trade unionist thought, Father Dietz remained in Oberlin
from 1906 to 1912 when he left for Milwaukee and a wider field. His
parents and sisters stayed on in their Oberlin home, a place of
complex local memories.